Harvard University Press - PHILOSOPHY

When Is Discrimination Wrong?

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Deborah Hellman
Hellman develops a much-needed general theory of discrimination. She demonstrates that many familiar ideas about when discrimination is wrong—when it is motivated by prejudice, grounded in stereotypes, or simply departs from merit-based decision-making—won’t adequately explain our widely shared intuitions. When Is Discrimination Wrong? explores what it means to treat people as equals and thus takes up a central problem of democracy.
Hardcover June 2008

Life and Action

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Michael Thompson
Any sound practical philosophy must be clear on practical concepts—concepts, in particular, of life, action, and practice. This clarity is Thompson’s aim in his ambitious work. In Thompson’s view, failure to comprehend the structures of thought and judgment expressed in these concepts has disfigured modern moral philosophy, rendering it incapable of addressing the larger questions that should be its focus.
Hardcover June 2008

Weaving Truth

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Ann Bergren
"What if truth were a woman?" asked Nietzsche. In ancient Greek thought, truth in language has a special relation to the female by virtue of her pre-eminent art-form--the one Freud believed was even invented by women--weaving. The essays in this book explore the implications of this nexus: language, the female, weaving, and the construction of truth.
Paperback June 2008

Benjamin's -abilities

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Samuel Weber
In this book, Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.
Hardcover May 2008

Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Zygmunt Bauman
Bauman urges us to think in new ways about a newly flexible, newly challenging modern world. In an era of routine travel, where most people circulate widely, the inherited beliefs that aid our thinking about the world have become an obstacle. He challenges members of the “knowledge class” to overcome their estrangement from the rest of society.
Hardcover May 2008

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Walter Benjamin
Edited by Michael W. Jennings
Edited by Brigid Doherty
Edited by Thomas Y. Levin
Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting.
Paperback May 2008

Theodor W. Adorno

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Detlev Claussen
Translated by Rodney Livingstone
This book gives us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own.
Hardcover April 2008

The Struggle against Dogmatism

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Oskari Kuusela
The Struggle against Dogmatism elucidates Wittgenstein’s view that there are no theses, doctrines, or theories in philosophy. This book makes Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach comprehensible by presenting it as a response to specific problems relating to the practice of philosophy, in particular the problem of dogmatism.
Hardcover April 2008

Persons and Things

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Barbara Johnson
In Persons and Things, Johnson begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space.
Hardcover April 2008

Quintessence

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

W. V. Quine
Roger F. Gibson, Editor
Quintessence for the first time collects Quine's classic essays in one volume, offering a much-needed introduction to his general philosophy. The selections take up analyticity and reductionism; the indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences and the inscrutability of reference; ontology; naturalized epistemology; philosophy of mind; and extensionalism. Representative of Quine at his best, these readings are fundamental not only to an appreciation of the philosopher and his work, but also to an understanding of the philosophical tradition that he so materially advanced.
Paperback April 2008

Radical Hope

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Jonathan Lear
Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, said, "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." In Jonathan Lear's view, Plenty Coups' story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one's culture might collapse? Radical Hope is a deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.
Paperback April 2008

German Idealism

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Frederick C. Beiser
Paperback March 2008

Lost Soul

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

John Makeham
Since the mid-1980s, Taiwan and mainland China have witnessed a sustained resurgence of academic and intellectual interest in ruxue—“Confucianism”—variously conceived as a form of culture, an ideology, a system of learning, and a tradition of normative values. This study aims to show how ruxue has been conceived in order to assess the achievements of this enterprise.
Hardcover March 2008

Thinking How to Live

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Allan Gibbard
Gibbard considers how our actions, and our realities, emerge from the thousands of questions and decisions we form for ourselves. The result is a book that investigates the very nature of the questions we ask ourselves when we ask how we should live, and that clarifies the concept of "ought" by understanding the patterns of normative concepts involved in beliefs and decisions. An original and elegant work of metaethics, this book brings a new clarity and rigor to the discussion of these tangled issues, and will significantly alter the long-standing debate over "objectivity" and "factuality" in ethics.
Paperback March 2008

Maimonides after 800 Years

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

Edited by Jay M. Harris
Moses Maimonides was the most significant Jewish thinker, jurist, and doctor of the Middle Ages, and author of a monumental code of Jewish law, and the most influential and controversial work of Jewish philosophy. The essays in this volume were written to mark the 800th anniversary of Maimonides' death in 1204. Written by the leading scholars in the field, they cover all aspects of Maimonides' work and influence.
Hardcover February 2008

Experiments in Ethics

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics. In this study, he urges that the relation between empirical research and morality, now so often antagonistic, should be seen in terms of dialogue, not contest. And he shows how experimental philosophy, far from being something new, is actually as old as philosophy itself.
Hardcover January 2008

Arguing the Just War in Islam

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

John Kelsay
Jihad, with its many terrifying associations, is a term widely used today, though its meaning is poorly grasped. Kelsay's timely and important work focuses on jihad of the sword in Islamic thought, history, and culture. Making use of original sources, Kelsay delves into the tradition of shari'a--Islamic jurisprudence and reasoning--and shows how it defines jihad as the Islamic analogue of the Western "just" war.
Hardcover November 2007

Love's Confusions

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

C. D. C. Reeve
Ranging from Plato to writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Proust, Forster, Beckett, Huxley, Lawrence, and Larkin, Reeve brings the vast resources of Western literature and philosophy to bear on the question of love. Looking at love in light of the classical world and Christianity, and in its complex relationship with pornography, violence, sadomasochism, fantasy, sentimentality, and jealousy, Reeve invites us to think more broadly about love, and to find the confusions that inevitably result to be creative rather than disturbing.
Paperback October 2007

The Death of Socrates

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Emily Wilson
Socrates's death in 399 BCE has figured largely in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity--many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In this book, Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination.
Hardcover October 2007

The Course of Recognition

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Paul Ricoeur
Translated by David Pellauer
Recognition, though it figures profoundly in our understanding of objects and persons, identity and ideas, has never before been the subject of a single, sustained philosophical inquiry. This work, by one of contemporary philosophy's most distinguished voices, pursues recognition through its various philosophical guises and meanings and, through the "course of recognition," seeks to develop nothing less than a proper hermeneutics of mutual recognition.
Paperback September 2007

A Secular Age

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charles Taylor
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
Hardcover September 2007

We Who Are Dark

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Tommie Shelby
We Who Are Dark provides the first extended philosophical defense of black political solidarity. Tommie Shelby argues that we can reject a biological idea of race and agree with many criticisms of identity politics yet still view black political solidarity as a needed emancipatory tool. In developing his defense of black solidarity, he draws on the history of black political thought, focusing on the canonical figures of Martin R. Delany and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Paperback September 2007

Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EDT

William C. Wimsatt
Analytic philosophers once pantomimed physics, trying to understand the world by breaking it down. Thinkers from the Darwinian sciences now pose alternatives to this simplistic reductionism. In a tour of essays spanning thirty years, Wimsatt argues that scientists seek to atomize phenomena only when necessary to understand how entities, events, and processes articulate at different levels. This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world.
Hardcover June 2007